I would second Tom Franklin's comments about hosted systems. I used to
work at a college that went down the hosted route precisely because of
the difficulty funding the technical support required in house. There
is also the added advantage of the servers etc. being hosted outside the
college so that any local problems do not affect the students. From a
VLE administrator's view there is no real difference where the server is
located as you manage the system through a browser (and often off
campus).
As well as Fronter a number of companies offer hosting. My experience
is with Teknical, a system that I would recommend for several reasons
not least their support for IMS standards, but no vle is perfect and
neither is any vle vendor. There are also companies that will host
Moodle for you. You may also want to check out
northumbrialearning.co.uk which is an interesting start up with "strong
HE roots".
On my current project we are using Moodle to provide a common vle
between different academic partners around the Mediterranean. It is
early days yet, but I can say that so far Moodle has run "out of the
box" and has not required any dedicated staff time to keep it up and
running.
Jim
======================================
Jim Everett
Quality Assurance Officer
Mediterranean Virtual University
University of Strathclyde
Alexander Turnbull Building
Glasgow
tel. +141 548 2186
fax. +141 548 4216
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